Fulfilment Marketing: Should You Be Investing?
Small businesses often overlook how order fulfilment and marketing work closely together. They can seem very divided, with fulfilment services ensuring timely delivery to customers, and marketing focused on promotional efforts. However, not including fulfilment in your marketing strategy can lead to missed opportunities to enhance customer experiences and foster brand loyalty. This is where fulfilment marketing becomes a critical tool for success in the eCommerce landscape.
Order fulfilment involves the process of picking, packing, and shipping online orders, either in-house or through outsourcing to order fulfilment experts, like GFS. It encompasses warehousing, SKU management, order picking, packing, shipping, and managing returns. The complexity of this process can but there are many opportunities for brand storytelling and personalisation.
Fulfilment marketing, also known as promotional or marketing fulfilment, offers a range of services to enhance post-purchase experiences. It comes in various forms, tailored to the nature of the business and its target audience. Some brands may want to include a brochure of upcoming product releases, whereas sample products may be a fit for others.
The alignment of marketing and fulfilment services is crucial. The moment of delivery is the first opportunity for customers to interact with the products and, by extension, the brand. Properly integrating these strategies unlocks numerous opportunities for storytelling, personalisation, and building lasting customer relationships.
Build Brand Awareness and Engagement
Fulfilment marketing allows brands to extend their presence beyond their online store. Branded packaging is a tangible representation of the brand identity, making the moment of delivery a crucial touchpoint in the customer journey. From custom boxes adorned with logos to colourful tissue paper and branded packing tape, every element reinforces the brand’s image. This consistency creates a lasting impression, turning routine deliveries into an opportunity for customers to connect emotionally to the brand, and increases the likelihood that customers will remember the brand in the future.
Surprise and Delight Customers
As well as branded packaging, packaging inserts and product sampling are powerful tools within fulfilment marketing. Packaging inserts, such as thank you notes or coupons, provide additional context and incentive. Product sampling, a widely embraced fulfilment marketing strategy, introduces an element of surprise and delight by offering customers complimentary items or exclusive previews, turning a standard transaction into a memorable purchase experience.
Omnichannel Engagement
Engaging delivery experiences bridge the gap between buying and receiving orders, providing opportunities to connect customers with various online channels and initiatives. For example, a customer may find you via Google and not visit your social media sites, so including leaflets that encourage people to follow you on social channels provides another way to connect with customers across different channels.
How to Execute a Fulfilment Marketing Strategy
Executing a fulfilment marketing strategy involves setting aside a budget, defining clear goals, and parent, and partnering with a fulfilment company that can help you implement your plans. GFS provides fulfilment services through purpose-built eCommerce warehousing, state-of-the-art technology and tailor-made Pick & Pack services. We ensure that our customers’ orders are packaged exactly how they want, with those extra touches that delight the final consumer.
The integration of fulfilment into marketing strategies is a powerful approach to stand out in the competitive eCommerce landscape, providing opportunities for brand differentiation, customer engagement and long-term success.
